


three times mako had to convince herself that she doesn’t have a gross crush on three complete dorks

by PunkHazard



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-10
Updated: 2015-03-10
Packaged: 2018-03-17 06:24:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3518729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PunkHazard/pseuds/PunkHazard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>because honestly, what would that do to her reputation?</p>
            </blockquote>





	three times mako had to convince herself that she doesn’t have a gross crush on three complete dorks

Leaving the Shatterdome is a supremely bad idea even on days without kaiju; close to an estimated breach opening, most of the crew stays on premises. Mako's not entirely sure why she's back in Akiba, but she knows she has to run-- away from a roar that shakes the ground and steps that cause seismic shifts every time a massive foot touches concrete, sends her stumbling, skin on her knees and palms scraped raw and bloody. It's the last corner, a chunk of debris on the ground that sends her to the asphalt.

She turns her head at a blast of dust. A shadow passes over, one clawed, reptilian sole descending--

Mako sits up, hand flying to her face. The tail end of an embarrassingly loud gasp echoes around the empty walls of her room (she considers installing bookshelves, once everything's settled in Hong Kong), but it's all dark and peaceful, nothing but the sound of water lapping against the Dome's edges and the dull, muffled creak of parts shifting in the hangar, pulled down by their own weight. Dragging her palm down to her mouth, Mako inhales deeply, holding the breath until her pulse begins to slow.

For about two seconds, Mako assumes she's in the clear-- then someone knocks on her door, three short raps. It sounds like Sensei, but the voice on the other side is less deep, less sure of itself. 「Mako? Are you alright?」

It's Cheung. Mako pulls her knees to her chest, buries her face in them. 「I'm fine,」 she calls back, trying to suppress the mortification in  
her voice. Of course it would be the triplets. Just when they'd started taking her seriously, too.

「You're sure?」 Jin asks, sounding unconvinced.

「 _Yes_!」

Hu answers this time, sounding mildly hurt that she'd be so brisk with them. 「Good night, then.」

Mako checks the time. It's nearly two in the morning, an unusual hour for everyone but a few LOCCENT officers on night shift to be awake. Engineers and technicians work during the day: lower likelihood of making mistakes. She reaches under her bed for her sneakers, slipping them on and dashing out in the gym shorts and t-shirt she'd worn to sleep. 「Actually,」 Mako says, sticking her head out her door, prompting the Weis to turn, 「where are you three going?」

「Kitchen,」 Hu answers with a mischievous grin, earlier slight forgotten, 「we just wrapped up for the night, come grab a midnight snack with us.」

Mako cups her hand over her mouth and asks in a conspiratorial hiss, 「Wrapped up on your secret Jaeger project?」

Jin presses a finger to his lips, making an exaggerated show of shushing her. 

「What are you doing up, anyway?」 asks Cheung, bringing their joking to a halt. 「We heard you yell.」

Mako scuffs her shoes on the metal floor, not meeting his eyes. Cheung's always been a calm center in the middle of that hurricane he calls his little brothers and he is also, in Mako's opinion, far too perceptive. 「I thought,」 she answers, 「I saw a huge bug, is all.」

The triplets look at her, all of them idly gauging her expression, the way her shoulders are drawn up. 「You hungry?」 Cheung asks, voice light, slinging an arm over her shoulders as they all start down the corridor. 「Food always gets our minds off a nightmare.」

Even casually, that's something Mako knows takes an enormous amount of effort to admit-- that the Weis would even get nightmares, that they could be affected by them. She leans into Cheung's side, his body warm and solid against her shoulder. 「It works?」

Hu grins over his shoulder, bumping Jin with his hip as they turn the corner. 「Every time, Mako-chan.」

She doesn't have much of an appetite (mostly attributed to an odd lightness in her chest), but when Jin shoves a pea they'd turned up in the freezer up Cheung's nostril with help from Hu, her stomach settles enough for her to inhale a massive bowl of soup and rice.

(When Cheung presses one nostril shut and snorts the pea out the other, Mako immediately finds room for some ice cream.)

* * *

Hazard days in the Jaeger bay are few and far between, but always fun. Mako's halfway through dismantling one of Crimson Typhoons saw hands with Jin when she sits back on her haunches and wipes the sweat off her forehead. They both have lead-lined aprons and googles on, which looks silly, but radiation isn't a joke in the HK Shatterdome. Watching kaiju blue eat through a contaminated carbon steel hinge is worth a few hours clomping around in funny-looking equipment.

They manage to salvage about 63 percent of the parts used to build the hinge, all of it cleaned, greased, maintenanced and returned to parts storage. Jaeger production isn't cheap, much less for a custom-built mech, so they save every scrap they can get. Most pilots don't bother, but the Weis tell her that it's as good a time as any to refamiliarize themselves with their mech during downtime, and it saves the PPDC money to boot.

「Hungry?」 Jin asks, once they've tossed their equipment into a cleaning bin. He glances up at the mainframe, where Cheung's involved in some sort of function on the computer, a tray on the table next to his keyboard. Hu's munching on a riceball, two more distending his pockets while he solders something near Crimson Typhoon's shoulderpiece. 「They started without me.」

Mako nods, laughing. 「Betrayed by your own blood.」

Jin inhales deeply, then shouts across the hangar that he and Mako are going to the canteen without the traitors, his voice filling every corner of the hangar. Cheung and Hu wave, then turn back to their work looking mildly amused. 

They're passing by Crimson Typhoon's foot when a tech yells, 「Above!」 and Mako looks up.

Jin doesn't bother, one hand automatically wrapping around the back of Mako's head and the other pulling her toward the titanium plating, wedging her between it and his chest. Not a split second later, a wrench clatters to the concrete floor of the hangar and bounces away, just barely missing their feet. Jin lets her go immediately and wanders forward, scoops up the wrench and curiously inspects the divot in concrete.

Cheung and Hu join him a few seconds later, looking over their brother before shouting a warning to be more careful at Yang, who had dropped the tool in the first place. 「Mako,」 Cheung says, quickly drawing her attention away from how much of a close call that was to the matter at hand, 「are you alright?」

「Yes. Thanks to Jin.」

「Lunch,」 Jin reminds her, sounding for all the world as if he regularly ducks heavy metal objects falling from above, allowing Cheung to punch him lightly in the chest before he shoves Hu back to his work. They barely look at each other once they've split; they almost never need to.

It's not until she's trailing him on the way to the cafeteria that Mako allows herself to backtrack, eyes on easy sway of his shoulders as he walks. 

(It's a dramatic difference from the hunched, tense, sharp-eyed Jin that had dragged her out of the way of an incoming wrench, heart pounding fast and shallow until his brothers came to him. He'd smelled like sweat and machines and ozone, the PPDC-issue soap she knows the Weis use. Some pine-y deodorant.)  


Mako shakes her head. 

She can admit that he was pretty cool, but Jin is still Jin, and he's just suggested mixing blue jello with the mashed potatoes, because 'wouldn't it be a lot faster to eat things with similar textures together?'

* * *

It had rained all through the service, double-funeral for Shaolin Rogue's two pilots. No bodies (the conn-pod had been melted through) and mostly indoors, but there's plenty of time for someone (more specifically, three someones) to get soaked between the Shatterdome pier and the helipad entrance. A small bouquet of white flowers sits at the edge, petals already wilting under the relentless pelt of rain. The Weis follow her to the recreation area when beckoned, leaving a trail of puddles behind them.

「Last respects,」 Cheung explains simply at Mako's curious look, taking the towels she hands over and distributing them between his brothers before burying his face in the material himself. He laughs lightly, swiping at his forehead again to catch water dripping from the crown of his head. 「You know, it was their favorite spot.」

They look out of place in crisp black suits. The fabric's been tailored to fit, made of something expensive and durable, lines cut to emphasize their broad shoulders and slim hips, long legs. Still, Mako prefers the ill-fitting techie reds they stomp around in, errant cloth tied down with whatever they have on hand, grinning faces streaked with grease. 

Maybe she's just come to associate Weis in suits with death. 

「How do you feel?"」 she asks instead, pushing a stack of t-shirts and three mugs of steaming ginger tea some engineer had prepared in advance acoss the center table toward them. 

「Sick of funerals,」 Jin answers, a muscle in his jaw twitching. He shrugs out of his blazer, rips his tie off and drops it on the couch before he starts to undo the buttons on his dress shirt, deft fingers making quick work of the buttons. Cheung and Hu change quickly as well, all three of them pulling on the tees over their still-dry undershirts. 「This is, what, the fifth time this year?」

「We'll frontline the next drop,」 Cheung says firmly, picking up a cup and downing a good half of it in one gulp, 「Crimson Typhoon can move faster than most active Jaegers.」

「No time for the plasmacaster to charge up then,」 Jin cuts in immediately, 「we'll need to fortify the arms, shoulderpiece needs a new alloy. Titanium isn't cutting it anymore, so maybe carbotanium.」 He's already got a notebook laid open in front of him, a pen retrieved from between couch cushions between his teeth. It's been a while since the Jaegers had seen drastic improvements, and there's hardly budget for it now so it doesn't escape Mako's notice that they're choosing only the most crucial parts to alter, automatically factoring the prices and Shatterdome budget into their calculations. 

They weren't the star students of Jaeger Academy's engineering class for nothing; Mako sits, leans forward and watches them tick off parts most techies probably wouldn't even have considered, building up a series of small, cheap tweaks to drastically improve overall performance. 

Out of the Weis, only Hu stays silent, fingers laced together in front of his nose, eyes narrowed and distant. When he finally speaks up, he says it quietly but both brothers immediately snap to attention. 

「The kaiju's reaction time, it's getting faster. This might not be enough.」 It's not the first time he's sounded miserable and Mako doubts it'll be the last, but he's rarely guilty, almost never so resigned. Hu buries his face in his hands, shoulders hunched but eyes wide through the spaces between his fingers. 「We waited too long for this. Maybe last drop we could've saved them but then the next time, and the time after. We can't keep up. We don't have the technology, or the money.」

Mako knows he's right; she doesn't know that they've read the studies, but their experience should be more than enough to tell them what all the papers say. That kaiju are growing more advanced, that they're evolving faster than Jaeger technology, that soon they'll outclass the Jaegers entirely. 

Cheung and Jin exchange a glance, their expressions grim. It's Jin who scoots closer, resting an arm on Hu's shoulder. 「We have the skill,」 he says simply. 「The Jaegers have a limit, but we don't.」

「A Jaeger's only as good as its pilots,」 Cheung tells him, arms crossing over his chest. 「We can reprogram the OS to be more responsive, more dependent on us. I've been planning to anyway.」

Hu looks up, eyes on his brothers for a long moment before the tension in his shoulders eases. Mako's pretty sure they've forgotten all about her, until he looks over and flashes her a sheepish grin. 「Sorry about that, Mako.」 He inhales deeply, mouth skewing into a crooked smirk to match Cheung and Jin's. 「You don't have anything to worry about. If the Jaegers aren't enough, then we'll just have to be more.」

Mako feels her face go warm, suddenly acutely aware of all the eyes on her. The churning in her stomach that had persisted from the end of the last drop through the funeral services and memorial seems to settle, calmed by their easy confidence. 「Your tea,」 she says stiffly, 「is going to get cold.」

Jin swipes up his mug immediately. 「Oh, yeah. Sorry. We have to go change, anyway.」

「It'll be boring,」 Hu adds, standing up with a playful grin and sticking his tongue out, 「but if you want to watch us start the upgrades before you and the Marshal leave for Tokyo, we'll be in the hangar after dinner. You're kind of a killjoy, so you'd probably like it.」

Mako nods, not trusting herself to come back with something properly cool and indignant. The retort comes to her long after they walk out of the room, joking about the buttprints they've left on the rec area couch.

* * *

She's barely out of her drivesuit before the smell hits her, some fragrance of sandalwood under thin, acrid smoke. Raleigh looks at her in question, but Mako shakes her head; it can only mean that they've salvaged Crimson Typhoon and Cherno Alpha. The momentary hope that one or more of the Kaidanovskys and triplets could still be alive flares for a second before she firmly suppresses it. She'd fought Otachi first-hand, nearly died even after the Weis had cut some of the kaiju's major tendons and muscles.

One of the engineers dashes by the decontamination unit while she and Raleigh are being scanned, pausing in the doorway to catch her eye. Jiewen shakes her head when Mako glances toward the hangar, and she swipes at her eyes before continuing on her way. 

"They're all dead," Raleigh says, voice distant, as if sensing the twisting, churning feeling in her gut. "Right?"

"Right."

Mako has heard people run the gamut of things not to say after a wipe; Raleigh wisely keeps his thoughts to himself, though he can't help the vestiges of it echoing through their hangover. ' _At least they're together,_ ' and ' _Pitfall's chances of success don't look great_ ,' and ' _I wonder what those guys were to her'_  chief among them.

"I need some time," Mako tells him, giving him a reassuring squeeze on the arm before she takes her leave. In the canteen, she sees the Marshal set three joss sticks in an incense burner, standing them upright in packed ash among several dozen others. He gives Mako a nod, patting her on the shoulder before motioning her forward.

Sensei's Buddhism isn't so similar to how it's practiced in Hong Kong and Mako doesn't consider herself particularly spiritual, but she takes three sticks and allows someone to light them, watching the weak flame burn on the ends before waving her hand and allowing the small burst of wind to put them out, eyes tracking the smoke as it curls up into the air. She bows the first time, incense held in front of her face, wondering if the brothers are watching.

_I'm sorry I couldn't be faster._

The second time, tears drip off her nose and land in front of her boots, snot threatening to join them before she sniffs and straightens.

_I'll miss you._

The third time, Mako stays bent at the waist for several long seconds, eyes closed.

_Maybe we will meet again in another life._

When she steps forward with the sticks, arm extended to plant them with the others, Sensei tells her gently, "Steady, Miss Mori."

Mako sets the incense, careful not to disturb any other sticks, bits of ash breaking off their tips and landing on the back of her wrist. She backs away and grits her teeth, hands coming together in front of her face for one last bow.

_For now, I will avenge you in this one._  



End file.
